The city streets would not mirror the silver lining in space during the festive season.

The day India successfully got a spacecraft into the Martian orbit on its maiden attempt, Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC) faltered in illuminating the streets within the deadline before Navrartri. Indian Space Research Organisation’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft started orbiting the Red Planet at 7.47am on Wednesday, creating history.

History repeated in Patna as well. The civic body once again failed to accomplish a mission — repairing streetlights by September 21.

As a part of a slew of orders under “Mission Sanitation” for the festivities, municipal commissioner Kuldip Narayan on September 11 approved Rs 28 lakh for repair of defunct streetlights across the city.

A week on, urban development and housing minister Samrat Chaudhary on September 18 said disciplinary action would be initiated against officers if any defunct streetlight was found in their jurisdiction during Navratri.

The warning appeared to have fallen on deaf ears. On the eve of Navrartri, hardly any road was illuminated. Forget colonies, arterial streets like Fraser Road, Ashok Rajpath, Exhibition Road, Bailey Road, Chiraiyatand Railway Over Bridge and Boring Road were enveloped in darkness on Wednesday night.

According to sources, there are around 6,000 streetlights in the city. The target was to repair 1,000 streetlights before Navratri.

Municipal commissioner Kuldip Narayan said: “The responsibility of repairing streetlights is on the executive officers of the four circles, while the monitoring is being done by additional municipal commissioner (sanitation and planning). They shall be in a better position to explain the exact progress made in the work.”

Shrisat Kapil Ashok, the additional municipal commissioner (sanitation and planning), also failed to provide the exact number of streetlights repaired by Wednesday evening. “Though I do not have the exact figures, around 250 streetlight were repaired by Tuesday. The work got affected because most of our engineers were busy in tackling the waterlogging in the city over the past few days,” said Ashok, adding that the final assessment of the streetlight repair work would be done after executive officers of all the four circles submitted their reports within a day or two.

The executive officer of New Capital circle, Vishal Anand, claimed that around 200 streetlights were repaired in the area in his jurisdiction. That means only 50 streetlights were installed in the rest of the three circles — Kankerbagh, Bankipore and Patna City.

“We have targeted to cover all important roads in the circle, including those around Gandhi Maidan, Bailey Road, Boring Road, Circular Road and Hardinge Road by Dussehra,” said Vishal Anand. He said the installation of CFL street lamps would start in the internal colonies from Saturday.

Till February 2011, Patna Electric Supply Undertaking took care of the maintenance of streetlights through contract with a private advertisement agency. Later, the work was handed over to PMC. The sources claimed that the civic body could not do much of the maintenance works because of dearth of technical manpower (electric engineer and technicians).